Celebration: An Anthology to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop Sands and Coral, 2011-2013
Silliman University, 2013
What a way to go, a mysterious death. It feels very dramatic, if sadly so. Gene Hackman will always be embedded in my young memory as a bumbling villain in Superman, my introduction to him. I have since loved, and have come to respect, the work he did in more iconic films such as The French Connection and Unforgiven and Bonnie and Clyde and The Conversation and The Birdcage, but I actually loved him the most in a disaster movie, The Poseidon Adventure. Like his character in that movie, he always looked like somebody who knew his way through life [or disaster], and stuck to it. That stance is to stan for. His retirement from film was met with much dismay, and we never got to see another film with him with this mysterious death. Rest in peace, Mr. Hackman.
I did not know this kung fu movie legend passed on a few days ago. I was introduced to Cheng Pei Pei in Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, which became my portal to her Hong Kong movies, Come Drink With Me (1966) being my favorite. Rest in peace, Queen of Swords.
This is sad because he was such a joyous hoot in everything he did, including his pandemic Instagram posts. Him sparring with Megan Mulally’s Karen Walker in Will & Grace was a constant delight.
I first encountered her as an evil matriarch intent on political dominion even through the cold brainwashing of her own son in The Manchurian Candidate [1962]. And then I bumped into her again as a tart English housemaid giving Ingrid Bergman the side eye in Gaslight [1944]. In both depictions, no matter how astringent her characters, she struck me as somebody to love, to watch out for. That’s Dame Angela Lansbury’s star power: you see through the depictions and realize the movie star underneath. No wonder that for both roles mentioned, she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the Oscars, an honor she truly deserved as winner more than nominee [especially for that chilling 1962 thriller]. But when I finally saw [or more correctly: heard] her as Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast [1991], where she would sing the iconic titular song, I was finally bowled over. What range! I never really followed her turn as the beloved Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote — I wasn’t really into following TV shows back in the day — but twelve seasons as that indefatigable detective points to her significant cultural cache. There have been other roles, many of them beloved — I particularly love her blustery drunk romance novelist in Death on the Nile [1978] — and for all that, she will be missed.
A few days ago, I decided to finally do something about my not having seen a single Russ Meyer movie—and watched three: Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! [1966], Beyond the Valley of the Dolls [1970], and The Seven Minutes [1971], the latter as a kind of corrective where you can find Meyer going beyond his usual B-movie schlock of boobs and guns and drugs by actually delving into “serious” stuff: a court case about a book accused of being obscene. I liked it, but it does pale in comparison to his acknowledged masterpieces. One surprise I found regarding Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!—his extravaganza about three go-go dancers making trouble in the desert—is that two of its vixens are of Filipino descent: the glorious Tura Satana [as Varla] is half-Japanese and half-Filipino, and Haji [as Rosie] is Canadian-born of British and Filipino descent.
There's a scene in Guy Hamilton's very inventive 1982 adaptation of Agatha Christie's Evil Under the Sun that made me a Diana Rigg fan forever: she plays a heartless, calculating, and cuckolding actress who would ultimately serve as the murder mystery's requisite inciting incident, and it would have been easy to dislike her immensely—heck, all the characters in the story want to murder her—were it not for one thing: she deploys charm that overwhelms mountains. In this scene in a hotel lobby overlooking the Adriatic Sea, she willfully and glamorously glides into the center of everyone's attention as someone plays the piano, singing Cole Porter's "You're the Top" with the gusto of a true performer and the poison of a vamp with an overwhelming desire to burn all bridges come what may. She uses the lyrics of the song to unleash all sorts of venom directed at specific people—but her glow is so unmistakable that those same people, knowing there is no antidote to her stings, nonetheless cannot help but applaud her. I saw that scene years ago, and I was like, "This woman can do anything. You may want to strangle her, but you also want to kowtow before her." That double-edged appeal has always been at the root of my fawning admiration for Dame Diana—she unleashed that power in everything from On Her Majesty's Secret Service to The Avengers to Game of Thrones. In the latter, for example, you knew her Olenna Tyrell was manipulative and corrupted by her privilege and power—but you also loved her. To be able to limn these contradictions and make meaty roles out of them was her mark. I love Dianna RIgg, present tense, and she will be missed.
Was watching Danny Zialcita's To Love Again [1983], and was struck once more how the movies just looked good having the late Miguel Rodriguez around. Him and his careful cadence of speech. He wasn't an actor of wide range, but the camera loved him, and that was enough. I'd remember him best in Johnny Manahan's Si Aida, Si Lorna, o Si Fe [1989] where he played a cad juggling three girlfriends. I miss a well-made Pinoy sex comedy. He died at age 36, and will be forever this young and beautiful in our memory.
I will always love Glee, no matter what critics demanded, often unfairly, of it: it filled a huge lack in television, and part of what made it fun was the fire, sass, and talent of Naya Rivera [1987-2020]. Listening to her sing "If I Die Young" during the farewell episode devoted to Cory Monteith, whose 7th death anniversary is today, now feels so prescient.
Romnick Sarmenta was the James Reid of my late 1980s childhood. He was inescapable; he was on every notebook cover. Every day in grade school, over recess or the school vegetable garden where we’d toil daily in the late afternoon, my classmates and I would go to war arguing who best deserved him in a love team: Jennifer Sevilla or Sheryl Cruz. I was pro-Jennifer for reasons I no longer remember [it was probably because I saw them together in Huwag Mong Buhayin ang Bangkay in 1987, which starred Jestoni Alarcon in his prime], and I burned with anger when somebody suggested otherwise. I’d brandish my trowel menacingly, and say, “Sheryl looks like a cat.”
Winona Ryder, in an interview with Diane Sawyer for 20/20 in 1999, revealed how it was to be complicit in hiding our deepest pain under a facade of fabulousness: “I used to drive around [Los Angeles] at night listening to music because I couldn’t sleep. [Once] I was driving around, and I was wishing so badly that I had someone to talk to, a friend, someone — and I didn’t. And I saw this magazine stand, and I saw the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine, and it said something like, ‘Winona Ryder, The Luckiest Girl in the World.’ And it broke my heart, because there I was being in so much pain and feeling so confused, and feeling so lost in my life. And I wasn’t allowed to complain because I was ‘so lucky,’ you know, and I was ‘so blessed,’ and I made a lot of money, and my problems weren’t real problems… But the stuff I was going through was difficult… I love the first line of [Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen, a book about a girl going through clinical depression, and being institutionalised for it]: ‘People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well. I can't answer the real question. All I can tell them is, It's easy.’ Which I think is very true.” She produced the film adaptation of the book, she said, to give a voice to people exactly like her.
And yes, to be "interrupted" is "easy."
By 2001, Winona succumbed to the pressure and famously self-sabotaged -- a shoplifting incident that made headline news and ruined her career, but which she, in retrospect today, calls her saving grace.
6:04 PM |
From William Haines to Matt Bomer, With Love
I was watching Gino M. Santos' Love Me Tomorrow (2016) straight through the lunchtime screening with two good friends because we wanted to escape from the mundane demands of work, and figured that a Star Cinema romantic drama -- with all the expected gloss and silliness -- would be enough of an escape from the pressing world. I also went because I loved Santos' two earlier features -- The Animals (2012) and #Y (2014) -- which made the cut for the Cinemalaya of their respective years, but ever since he made the leap to commercial filmmaking, I've lost track of his output. Ex With Benefits (2015), anyone? This new Piolo Pascual starrer proved to be a good way to be reintroduced to the gloriously burgis cinema of Gino Santos, clearly the heir apparent of Danny Zialcita even if the wit of the old master has yet to really embrace the young director. And so we traipsed through the inoffensive story about a DJ past his prime (played with jagged cockiness by Mr. Pascual), who happens to bed occasionally on the side a pretty "social media influencer" (Coleen Garcia transcending a thankless role) -- but finds himself unwittingly falling for an older widow and budding fashion designer (gamely portrayed by Dawn Zulueta, who reminds us that old movie stars shatter everyone else in their light). There's not much to this old chestnut of reverse May-December romance, and I could recommend it for its insistence that life has no villains. But what got me thinking after exiting the movie house was this: Piolo Pascual -- an enduring moviestar whose beauty is not diminished by the years -- has done almost all sorts of romantic pairings, but not once has he ever played half of a gay couple. In that respect, his contemporaries Dennis Trillo and John Lloyd Cruz have him beat, and to think these two remain the ultimate of machismo in Philippine contemporary cinema. There have been the persistent rumours of course regarding Mr. Pascual's sexuality, and his refusal to play gay only seem to magnify it.
I can understand the dilemma. It is an unfortunate truism in show business that being openly gay is bad for business for movie actors of certain box office categories. A character actor, forever in a supporting role, may be able to get away with being out of the closet, but stars?
Hollywood itself is littered with stories of actors in and out of the closet. I love the story of William Haines who once ruled Hollywood as its biggest box office star. Out Magazine writes about him: "Known as a wisecracking leading man, William 'Billy' Haines was the top box office draw of 1929, was friends with a young Cary Grant and remained lifelong besties with Joan Crawford. Through it all he was more or less openly gay, at the cost of his movie career, and married for 50 years to the same sailor he picked up on a publicity trip to New York in 1926. Crawford once called the relationship between Haines and Jimmy Shields 'the happiest marriage in Hollywood.'" [More here. Slate also has a story here.] That marriage was what cost him his movie career, but it was a cost he was willing to pay. Forced by MGM honcho Louis B. Meyer to give up Jimmy for the sake of moral policing in the wake of the restrictive Hollywood Code, he gave up movie stardom instead of giving up on the love of his life. Known for his opulent taste, he went on to have a very successful second career as an interior designer. His fascinating life has been made into a 2001 documentary for AMC titled Out of the Closet, Off the Screen: The Life of William Haines...
Then there's Tab Hunter. He came to the movies in 1950 with a role in The Lawless, but his blonde good looks soon landed him a meaty role in Island of Desire (1952) opposite Linda Darnell, and soon he was starring in a string of films including Gun Belt (1953), The Steel Lady (1953), Return to Treasure Island (1954), Track of the Cat (1954), and Battle Cry (1955). In September of 1955, the tabloid magazine Confidential wrote about his 1950 arrest for disorderly conduct, and alluded that the actor perhaps was gay. It had no impact on his career, however, and a few months later, Hunter was named Most Promising New Personality in a nationwide poll sponsored by the Council of Motion Picture Organizations. He went on to star in many movies, and later took to television, and oversaw a career that had its highs and lows -- but he never became the full-fledged movie star he promised to become early in his career. But I'm not sure his being gay had something to do with that. Some actors become big stars, some don't -- and that's that.
Tab Hunter's life as a gay actor working in Hollywood has been immortalised in the recent documentary Tab Hunter Confidential (2015), directed by Jeffrey Schwarz -- The Hollywood Reporter writes about it here.
Of late, many well-known actors have since bucked the trend -- perhaps a reflection of a new openness. And so we have the likes of James Franco, Joel Grey, Ellen Page, Maria Bello, Anna Paquin, Wentworth Miller, Matt Dallas, Raven-Symone, Ellen Degeneres, Portia DiRossi, Jodie Foster, Jim Parsons, Evan Rachel Wood, Neil Patrick Harris, and others in various stages of coming out [The New York Daily News has a list here. The Los Angeles Times also has a list here. And so does Entertainment Tonight, here.] Among them all, Matt Bomer stands tall. Openly gay -- and yet still remaining irresistible to both men and women alike. The roles he is given do not even consider his gayness. He plays straight, too -- and convincingly so. And nobody minds.
But will some of the most major movie stars hounded for so long about their sexuality -- they will remain unnamed here -- ever choose to come out? Perhaps not. One gets used to the confines of the closet sometimes.
Nicolas Kazamia's Gay Hollywood: The Last Taboo (2009)is a good documentary that tackles the issue. The film, according to its catalogue, "looks at the challenges facing gay artists in Hollywood past and present. Hollywood in the 1920s was the most homosexual friendly place to be as most of the behind-the-camera staff were gay. However, for those in front of the camera there was no tolerance from the movie-going public. Any homosexual who wanted to maintain a career had to remain in a well-locked closet. During the 1950s, the studios provided their own 'police' who would be the first to arrive at any scene of an 'indiscretion' or other scandalous act. Their task was to collect and remove any evidence and then call the real police if necessary. The studios, wanting to safeguard their investments, even forced male gay actors, like Rock Hudson and Cary Grant, into sham marriages." You can see the entire film below...
So, will Mr. Pascual ever choose to play a gay role? Let's hope he does...
8:08 PM |
A Lot of Things Can Happen in Ten Years.
I leafed through it at first with the detachment of somebody just biding his time. It was there, and my meal was still cooking. I was waiting, and this issue of Vanity Fair was on the magazine stand. It had Tom Cruise on the cover, his hair long, his pose relaxed but studiedly masculine, as if to say, "I am the biggest star of them all, and here you are, picking up this magazine because of me." I did not. I've always liked Vanity Fair, and if it were Adrien Brody on the cover, I'd still pick it up. I glanced at the date. June 2000. I whistled, smiled a bit. How long ago this was. Ten years? A lot of things can happen in ten years. Heck, a lot of things can happen in a year -- and I began to look closely at that. This magazine was a time machine, you can say. Or a snapshot of a moment in popular culture, a little more than a year before things really changed and transformed us all. This issue came out fifteen months before those planes swooped down and flattened the towers -- and changed the world forever. What was I doing in June 2000? Probably starting to get into Graduate School, inching my way into a career in teaching, even as I plotted my way out of my first job as editor of this local newspaper. The plans for the Silliman University centennial celebrations were underway, and Dumaguete was still a quiet town. I looked inside. The pictures inside the pages looked quaint, brushed by some form of innocence in all its brashness and celebration of the commercial and the small. The people in it looked too happy, or too deliriously drugged out. Oblivious. There is an ad with the Sex and the City girls coming off its first season -- all of them still looking buxom and young -- daring us: "Are you ready for more?" In the Hollywood pages, the Vanity Fair post-Oscar party was riddled with pictures of faces that were celebrated as new -- but are now considered vintage, long-gone couplings -- Salma and Edward, Tom and Nicole. (Kidman, apparently, was in Australia filming Moulin Rouge.) Clasping her Oscar, Angeline Jolie is dressed as Morticia Adams, with no hint of the luster that would soon make her the Most Beautiful Woman in the World. The ads for luxury goods come and go, lackluster in appeal, but one ad struck me: Lucky Strikes, and its tag line: "It's Toasted." (Years later, Mad Men would recreate the coining of that line.) The waitress brought me my food, and I began eating, and I turned the pages some more. In one piece, Lance Armstrong chronicles his battle with cancer, and in another, Hillary Clinton takes on Rudy Guiliani. Cameron Crowe interviews Cruise for the issue, and begins with an anecdote about Cruise reading out loud over the phone the lines of Lester Bangs from a movie Crowe is set to direct -- something still called Untitled. (Almost Famous was still a dream.) In the interview, Cruise reflects on the strange reception towards Stanley Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut. (Kubrick just recently died, his last film a misunderstood masterpiece.) In another story, Helen Gurley Brown gushes about her new book I'm Wild Again, and answers questions about plastic surgery on enhancing the labia. "Does it give girls better orgasm?" she asks. On one editorial fashion spread, Jennifer Lopez, glammed up in a series of scenes, still looks like she is still unscrubbed Jenny from the block -- with none of the incandescence of her American Idol future. (In 2000, there was no American Idol.) So many things. Ten years ago. I finished my food, closed the magazine, and went home.
GQ's Alex Pappademas goes into speculative mode in his great profile on Winona Ryder, answering this question: What if the actress never got arrested for shoplifting and never took those pills?
Imagine a parallel universe where there is not this Winona-shaped hole in recent cool-movie history. She'd have been one of the Dylans in Todd Haynes's I'm Not There, for sure. Maybe the object of Jim Carrey's amnesia in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. She could have been a Tenenbaum.* Maybe even a Cullen.
* Yes, Wes Anderson shot The Royal Tenenbaums before her arrest. But let's say, in this parallel universe, Winona doesn't drop out of Godfather III, which creates a butterfly-effect ripple across the space-time continuum: Sofia Coppola doesn't replace her, which means Sofia Coppola's performance isn't eviscerated by the press, which means she continues to act instead of pursuing a career behind the camera, and the adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides's novel The Virgin Suicides falls to a fresh-off-Rushmore Wes Anderson, delaying Tenenbaums by two years. Winona plays Margot, obviously. During the film's opening weekend, syndicated radio personality Glenn Beck is mauled by a tiger.
I miss Winona Ryder. That girl had subtlety. Take note of her May Welland in Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence: so sweet and caring ... and manipulative. Please bring her back, Hollywood.
9:13 PM |
Robert Redford, 1936–2025
I leafed through it at first with the detachment of somebody just biding his time. It was there, and my meal was still cooking. I was waiting, and this issue of Vanity Fair was on the magazine stand. It had Tom Cruise on the cover, his hair long, his pose relaxed but studiedly masculine, as if to say, "I am the biggest star of them all, and here you are, picking up this magazine because of me." I did not. I've always liked Vanity Fair, and if it were Adrien Brody on the cover, I'd still pick it up. I glanced at the date. June 2000. I whistled, smiled a bit. How long ago this was. Ten years? A lot of things can happen in ten years. Heck, a lot of things can happen in a year -- and I began to look closely at that. This magazine was a time machine, you can say. Or a snapshot of a moment in popular culture, a little more than a year before things really changed and transformed us all. This issue came out fifteen months before those planes swooped down and flattened the towers -- and changed the world forever. What was I doing in June 2000? Probably starting to get into Graduate School, inching my way into a career in teaching, even as I plotted my way out of my first job as editor of this local newspaper. The plans for the Silliman University centennial celebrations were underway, and Dumaguete was still a quiet town. I looked inside. The pictures inside the pages looked quaint, brushed by some form of innocence in all its brashness and celebration of the commercial and the small. The people in it looked too happy, or too deliriously drugged out. Oblivious. There is an ad with the Sex and the City girls coming off its first season -- all of them still looking buxom and young -- daring us: "Are you ready for more?" In the Hollywood pages, the Vanity Fair post-Oscar party was riddled with pictures of faces that were celebrated as new -- but are now considered vintage, long-gone couplings -- Salma and Edward, Tom and Nicole. (Kidman, apparently, was in Australia filming Moulin Rouge.) Clasping her Oscar, Angeline Jolie is dressed as Morticia Adams, with no hint of the luster that would soon make her the Most Beautiful Woman in the World. The ads for luxury goods come and go, lackluster in appeal, but one ad struck me: Lucky Strikes, and its tag line: "It's Toasted." (Years later, Mad Men would recreate the coining of that line.) The waitress brought me my food, and I began eating, and I turned the pages some more. In one piece, Lance Armstrong chronicles his battle with cancer, and in another, Hillary Clinton takes on Rudy Guiliani. Cameron Crowe interviews Cruise for the issue, and begins with an anecdote about Cruise reading out loud over the phone the lines of Lester Bangs from a movie Crowe is set to direct -- something still called Untitled. (Almost Famous was still a dream.) In the interview, Cruise reflects on the strange reception towards Stanley Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut. (Kubrick just recently died, his last film a misunderstood masterpiece.) In another story, Helen Gurley Brown gushes about her new book I'm Wild Again, and answers questions about plastic surgery on enhancing the labia. "Does it give girls better orgasm?" she asks. On one editorial fashion spread, Jennifer Lopez, glammed up in a series of scenes, still looks like she is still unscrubbed Jenny from the block -- with none of the incandescence of her American Idol future. (In 2000, there was no American Idol.) So many things. Ten years ago. I finished my food, closed the magazine, and went home.
